Corporate venture capital (CVC) is emerging as one of the most promising funding channels for Africa’s startup ecosystem, offering corporates fresh avenues for innovation while widening the capital pool available to young companies. Current sentiment across the continent reflects this shift, with more than 70% of African investors expressing confidence in the model’s potential.
Among its advocates is Abdulyekeen Abdulazeez, innovation venture manager at Wema Bank, a Nigerian financial institution valued at roughly $552 million. With prior experience at Ventures Platform and the Lagos Angel Network, Abdulazeez now plays a key role in guiding Wema’s investments and supporting the bank’s growing portfolio of early-stage ventures.
Speaking with TechCabal, he argued that corporates—often overlooked in conversations about African venture funding—are uniquely positioned to back startups with deep contextual understanding. Many, he said, have survived regulatory turbulence, economic shocks, and infrastructural deficits for decades. “That depth of experience is invaluable,” he noted, pointing out that corporate balance sheets, customer bases, and operational resources offer advantages traditional VCs cannot always match.
At Wema Bank, the corporate venture mandate is driven primarily by strategic returns rather than financial ones. Startups selected for investment gain access to a suite of digital tools—including wallet and payout APIs via AlatPay—as well as direct exposure to Wema’s large customer network and operational teams. These integrations allow founders to reach product-market fit more quickly, while the bank sometimes becomes a client itself, creating dual-value relationships.
“We give startups immediate access to the kind of infrastructure and credibility that would normally take them months or years to build on their own,” Abdulazeez said, adding that Wema’s digital platforms help startups plug directly into the systems necessary for rapid launch and early distribution.
The bank remains sector-agnostic and is open to funding companies that build products overlapping with traditional banking services. With an average cheque size of $40,000, Wema views entrepreneurs not as competitors but as “indispensable allies” capable of complementing and extending its existing capabilities.
Much of this activity sits under the bank’s flagship Hackaholics programme, an in-house innovation pipeline offering mentorship, capital, and infrastructure to high-potential startups. The initiative has supported more than 100 ventures, including well-known names such as TeamApt (now Moniepoint), Plumter, Feegor, MyItura, and Build Africa.
Reflecting on Nigeria’s financial ecosystem, Abdulazeez said the motivation behind Wema’s CVC strategy is not a response to sectoral gaps but recognition of a “major opportunity.” The regulatory environment has encouraged experimentation and enabled a wave of agile founders to build solutions at unprecedented speed. In this context, Wema asked: How can we support this momentum in a way that adds real value?
The answer, he said, lies in providing what startups often lack most—market access, infrastructure, credibility, distribution, and operational support. By extending these resources, Wema aims to help founders enter the market faster and scale more sustainably while strengthening the bank’s wider innovation ecosystem.
Alongside his role at Wema, Abdulazeez is also a co-founder of Ule Homes, a Lagos-based rent-financing startup born from a shared housing-access challenge he encountered with classmates during postgraduate study.
As Africa’s startup economy evolves, observers say CVC could become a defining feature of the continent’s funding landscape. Wema Bank’s model—centred on strategic collaboration—offers a case study in how corporates and startups can jointly accelerate innovation across financial services and beyond.